My first visit to St Ives started badly. It was like Bethlehem at census time. My wife, Sue, was pregnant and there was no room at the inn. Camping was out of the question - my days of public showering and meals that tasted of Calor gas were over - and the trip was as good as cancelled when the phone rang and we were offered a fisherman's cottage in the suspiciously named Love Lane.

It was a take-it-or-leave-it offer, the last available place in town, apparently, so we took it. Holiday lets in St Ives are hardly scarce, even in August, but this was August 1999, and with nearly everybody else the country we'd decided to go to the south-west to experience a few minutes of darkness. Not your run-of-the-mill kind of darkness, but a total solar eclipse. I'd written a play about the event a few years earlier (imaginatively entitled Eclipse ), all based on guesswork and it was time to see if I'd got it right.

After sitting behind a cortege of caravans that stretched from Birmingham to Truro, we dropped down the hill from Carbis Bay towards St Ives and followed signs for the harbour. I'd pulled a map off the internet and memorised a route that would lead us to the front door of our love nest. What I hadn't realised was that the streets of St Ives's 'downalong' area, such as the Digey and Bunkers Hill, are little more than cobbled passageways better suited to pack mules than they are to wide-bodied VWs. I ended up parking about two miles away, and by the time I'd lugged the cases through the labyrinth of alleyways and switchbacks, I was spitting feathers and coughing blood. Like Glastonbury in the rain, by now I was wishing I'd stayed at home and watched it on telly.

That was five years ago, almost exactly, and I've been back to St Ives on at least 20 occasions. My grumpiness didn't last long. Love Lane is now firmly established in our family mythology (a sort of Nativity scene, but without the donkey), although the trap-door entrance to the bathroom proved even less suitable for a child than it was for a mother-to-be. We've since found a better hideaway on the other side of town.

The trips to Cornwall have become an important part of my working practice. I'm not one for gazing out to sea and going all dewy-eyed over the beauty of nature, but I have experienced a growing connection between creativity and relaxation. There has to be time in the year, usually the summer, when I can daydream and write, and by writing I don't mean prose.

I don't take a laptop with me. St Ives, for me, means notebooks and pens, which means hand-carving each letter, which means thoughts being turned into words at a slower, more considered pace, which means poems. I don't always finish them in situ, and they're rarely about St Ives itself, but I can now point to at least a dozen poems that have their beginnings in Cornwall.

St Ives is a bay, an isthmus and a headland. On a small-scale map, it appears to face north, but its peculiar geography means that it's possible to stay in the sun all day and find somewhere out of the wind. There are four main beaches, which have developed a fascinating taxonomy. One, Porthmeor, faces west: it's favoured by surfers and body-boarders and in afternoons in high season you have to step over the ponytails to get to shoreline.

That waterfront is also home to the Tate, whose presence has reinforced St Ives's reputation as an artistic community once and for all. Being a seaside town, the grot and the tack sit side by side with serious paintings (the closer to the sea the gallery, the worse the art - that's my rule of thumb), but the variation is all part of the attraction. The same goes for the people: for every bevy of men in suede slip-ons and black polo-necks who've helicoptered in from Cork Street for the day, there's a gang of dickheads hanging around the slot machines causing a little bit of friction.

And without friction there is no art. I like to think I'm alert to that friction, responding to it, feeding off it, becoming part of the artistic life of the town, perhaps. But mostly I'm off-duty, a half-shaven husband and T-shirted dad flying a kite on Porthminster Beach.

For some, the famous St Ives light can't compare with the bright lights of the city, and I know at least two families who've relocated to Cornwall only to high-tail it back up country after a couple of years. But after a six-hour drive, usually arriving at midnight, the lights that catch my eyes are the two red ones above the wooden buffers at the end of St Ives railway station. I can't go any further away from home in Britain without getting my feet wet; those glowing red lamps signify the end of the line and the beginning, hopefully, of a few poems.

· Simon Armitage is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including Killing Time, as well as four stage plays and two novels.